The Art of Life - Believing in the Real

 Last night we watched The Commitments, a film which reminded me of how much I’ve always loved soul music, often without quite realising that it is soul that I am listening to. It takes a film to bring the songs and music of one’s youth together into a single memory, and so remind us of why they were so intensely meaningful at the time. Why did they resonate with feelings which we did not yet fully understand? And why do they still? I don’t think it has anything to do with nostalgia. It has to do with good art. Good art is not about nostalgia. It endures because it is about truth. Soul is a prime example of good art because it was, and remains, agonisingly truthful. It also generates a need for truthfulness, for a certain kind of reality. It does this most effectively when those who are performing cannot name that reality and, like The Commitments, have only a partial understand of their own need for it, so that they have no intellectualised creative agenda. Their creativity is consummated in the moment of self giving which good performance and all good art requires of the artist.

This kind of creative uncertainty is fraught with difficulties. Both the process and the work itself are extremely fragile. Where bands are concerned, everything hinges on the creative and complex relationships within the group, as The Commitments were to find out, but too late to save the band. Inevitably, there was conflict, but conflict and creativity go together because the energy which drives people against one another, and sometimes against the very work which they are producing, is the energy of both creativity and chaos.

Good collaborative art is created out of initial chaos, that initial anarchic energy from which life and the coherence of universes and species derives. When bands or other creative partnerships die it is easy to blame the ‘maker’, or, as in the case of The Commitments, the band’s manager. But it takes more than good management, or even a collective will to get the show back on the road, to bring it alive again. A new connection needs to be made, between life and death, between chaos and the kind of dynamic order which brings new life.

This is where the Christian story of Easter starts to be ‘relevant’, to use that most banal of expressions. On the evening of the first day of the week, the day his tomb was discovered empty, Jesus suddenly appears to his friends who have locked themselves  in a small room, fearing that they would be the next to be arrested. ‘Appear’ is a misleading word because it suggests something not quite real. A real person, or solid object, does not ‘appear’. It is either there or not there. What makes Christ’s actual presence, his ‘being there’, so real, is that he comes into their midst when they are most afraid and therefore most likely to turn on one another and destroy the work already begun in them, which is what happened to The Commitments.

For his disciples, Jesus is what he always was, but he is also more than that. He is the reason and purpose of their life and work, the full embodiment of something already known by them, but which, in this moment of fear and chaos, they had probably half forgotten, so their work could not be fully consummated. The Commitments also had a shared understanding, a kind of knowing, of what they were about. Something greater than themselves made it possible for them to make great music, but they lost sight of this greater purpose in dressing room conflicts which were fuelled by selfish egoism leading to their inevitable disintegration as a band.

The group of friends cowering behind closed doors in the immediate aftermath of the Resurrection might have been in a similar state of disintegration, bickering about who saw Jesus first after the tomb was found empty, and about a host of other issues all of which would have amounted to the need to protect the individual and his or her immediate interests, and all blown out of proportion by fear.

Jesus is suddenly among them in this chaotic situation, so chaotic that they do not immediately recognise his presence. It is, in any case, a very different kind of presence than the one they are used to which was so hideously distorted in the suffering of his final hours. The marks and wounds are on the physical body, but the body is also gloriously different. It is physical, but more than physical. It transcends all that they remember of him and yet it is still him. From the physical breath of Christ’s words, “Peace be with you” comes the Spirit of creation itself, so it is a moment of consummate artistry, the  kind of artistry which dispels chaos and changes the way those who work together see each other and how they understand, and ultimately consummate, the work they are given to do.